Tag: City of Titans

Whatever Happened To: Those City of Heroes Successors


Every once in a while I get an email asking “Connor, why don’t you talk about those various City of Heroes successor games?” That’s an oddly specific question, and one that harkens back to a time where any article I wrote about NCSoft would result in a flurry of emails threatening to boycott my website or trying to get me fired for not mentioning whatever CoH successor was crowdfunding. Now I’m not going to name names (because I don’t actually remember who did it) but having a PR rep from a volunteer project reach out to chastise me for not mentioning their game in an article about City of Heroes, and to imply that I was being paid by another project to not mention them? Eventually it’s not worth talking about anybody.

But 2020 is a new year and a new decade and the fervor over NCSoft is over, and I’d like to know where the Kickstarter money I threw in seven years ago went, so it’s time to catch up on those City of Heroes successors. Do we even need these titles now that they have taken so long to release that a secret underground moleman community has been discovered and shared their private server with the world? Who knows. Are any of these games actually going to see their way to completion? It’s been eight years.

In no particular order because God forbid I get emails asking why one project was listed above another, let’s just dive in.

1. Valiance Online – It’s In Alpha

Valiance Online is the Unity-built successor to City of Heroes and one of the few on this list that did not run a (successful) Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaign. The investor alpha was made available back in October 2017 and those interested in getting in on the project can donate a minimum of $25 to gain access to founders perks. From a quick glance it looks like the alpha server was taken down back in November 2019 for a big update and has not yet come back up.

If there is one complaint that can be lobbied at the Valiance Online people it is that their communication is terrible. The news section hasn’t seen an update since November 2018, the forum is a mess to navigate, and the Twitter also has not been updated since November 2019 during the latest maintenance update. As a title that started very early compared to the other COH successors, I feel like Valiance Online may have blew its load too soon. I remember playing a pre-alpha four or five years ago and just very quickly losing interest as the game was many years off of release.

Who knows, Valiance Online is clearly in active development with things to show for it. Hopefully they can take that stretch toward beta and make the game more widely available.

2. Ship of Heroes – Character Creator Beta

Ship of Heroes has progressed far enough to have released a character creator beta test back in November where players could go in and create characters, have a costume contest, and even test out their powers and walk around the ship. Ship of Heroes is a City of Heroes successor set on a spaceship traveling through space (as they do). It is built on the Unreal Engine and pretty regularly puts out news updates with screenshots of how the game is progressing.

Of the games on this list, Ship of Heroes seems to be in the best position to put out a launch product first considering it is being run by an actual company with faces instead of a rag tag group of unpaid volunteers. Not to diminish the work of the other games on this list, but Ship of Heroes just seems to be in the strongest position as an organization of developers.

3. City of Titans – Character Creator

Of course I would be remiss to talk about Ship of Heroes launching its character creator tool without also mentioning City of Titans by Missing Worlds Media who launched their own character creator a couple weeks earlier. Out of everything on this list, I have to say City of Titans feels like the closest to an actual spiritual successor to City of Heroes. Where the other games on the list are creating a modern superhero MMO, the videos and screenshots released by Missing Worlds Media make the game look like it is trying to stay true to form and bring gamers back to the world that they had once lost but can incidentally now play again.

Admittedly out of everything on this list, City of Titans is the game I’m most looking forward to.

Missing Worlds Media is a bit of an enigma for me as they regularly want to have their cake and eat it too. City of Titans was funded in 2013 to the tune of 678 thousand smackers, yet whenever I talk about the game coming along at a snail’s pace and far beyond the campaign’s original delivery date, I get inundated with comments about how the team is staffed by unpaid volunteers and that I should just shut my stupid face about it. I don’t know what to tell you; you’re either a dev pulling 700 grand plus to fund development or you’re a group of volunteers making this game for free in your spare time (ie; people complaining about efficiency should shut up). You can’t expect to be treated as both when it’s most convenient.

4. Heroes & Villains – ??????????????

Heroes and Villains is a superhero MMO created and run by the players with an official website that looks like it was optimized to run on Windows 95. Of the current titles on the list (#5 notwithstanding), Heroes & Villains gives me the least confidence. If the team is working hard behind the scenes, they are keeping a very tight hold on things. They regularly update the website with new notes about progress being made but it’s three or four lines of commentary with nothing of actual substance to show or back up that the game is making any real progress.

The website has concept art from 2013-2015 and the Youtube channel was last updated three years ago with test animations while most of the forum has been abandoned for years. Plan Z is made up of volunteers similar to City of Titans but unlike Missing Worlds Media doesn’t have $700 grand in crowdfunding revenue to work with. Out of everything on this list (again, #5 notwithstanding) it is literally a hobby project that some folks are working on in their spare time.

If this game does launch or for that matter even release a beta, it will be quite a surprise.

5. Redside – Dead As A Corpse

Redside was an attempt by Brass Lampworks to make a City of Villains successor. Unfortunately the project launched its Kickstarter to the complete disinterest of nearly everyone with a dollar to spare and ultimately pulled in $170 from four backers. The website for developer Brass Lampworks is no longer in operation and it’s clear that the game has been killed in the crib.

“This game is designed in the spirit of NCSoft’s closed MMO “City of Villains”  This MMO will work the same premise, but a new direction.  We will have a cast of completely different characters on masterfully crafted storylines, updated graphics, cross platform functionality, and possible VR in future updates.”

Maybe it’s because the Kickstarter expressly stated that the money was to “get the ball rolling” and not to create an actual product. Maybe it’s because the creator was not a game developer and had no idea what he was doing, instilling no confidence that pumping money into this void would result in anything except a bunch of backers getting swindled by someone playing on their nostalgia.

In Conclusion

If you want to play City of Heroes, you can absolutely do so right now thanks to the Homecoming server. It is just as jank as you remember and boy howdy is it glorious.

Missing World Media Returns: City of Titans


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Earlier this week, I got to sit down once again and have a chat with Missing Worlds Media about their upcoming game City of Titans. If you didn’t catch out interview published last year, check it out at this link. For this interview, I managed to snag project lead Chris “Warcabbit” Hare to talk about design philosophy, alignment, and lockboxes, among other topics.

A big thank you to Missing Worlds Media and Warcabbit for agreeing to talk to us again.

Connor: Start off by telling us who you are and what you do.

Warcabbit: Greetings, all! I’m Chris ‘Warcabbit’ Hare. By day… well, I can’t say what I do by day, but by night, I’m project lead for City of Titans, a crowdfunded Superhero MMO, and a spiritual successor to City of Heroes.

The last time we talked, City of Titans was ending its pre-production stage. What is the main focus right now?

Slightly scattered. Tech is at early production leading to solid and functional prototype, while Lore is actually writing what will become production-level missions. Art is iterating designs while we deal with disagreements about where to slice the body up and how to apply sliders.

Sometimes the disagreements are with parts of the engine that haven’t been written yet. This doesn’t mean we’re out of synch, it means that certain things, like Lore, are not limited by technical realities, and are able to design and test in theory rather than in practice.

So something that gets written in lore that can’t be represented in-game?

It’s… hard to think of something that can be written in lore that can’t be represented in game, within the constraints Lore already knows about. That is, the design constraints are established already. Things that are out of the ordinary, like six mile long snake-beasts are on hold, yes. But we’re working more with things that are technically possible – but questioning the game-centric nature of the beast.

We want to fill our game with story and valid choices, but we’ve found there are many players who just want to punch things. So we’re working on story structure and various other issues that are, ah, trivial from a coding issue – I mean, when you get down to it, we could throw all of Moby Dick on someone’s screen in five lines of code – but they wouldn’t read it.

Anyhow, so what we’re working on is when will people like a valid choice about good and evil, or right and wrong, and coming to the conclusion that people will  not like it so much mid-mission, but end of mission is much more acceptable. Like, ‘do you turn in the 40k of drug money, or pocket it’?

Are you going with a clear good vs evil or allowing players to blur the lines like City of Heroes sort-of did with Going Rogue?

Dramatic timing and tension and various other things – if we throw a question in mid-story, it suddenly becomes much MORE important because of the rarity. We have a three axis alignment system, along with a villain/rogue/vigilante/hero (names picked from Going Rogue for this conversation for familiarity’s sake) axis.

For example, the first challenge I mentioned was (money) a Law axis question. Do you respect the law or take the cash? The second was a Violence question. Do you just beat the guy up or do you kill him? The last axis is Honor. Do you keep your word, even if it causes you pain? Dr. Doom is a villain with a strong Honor axis. The thing is, the slider-axis is actually independent of the alignment axis – the Punisher is a Violent, non-Lawful, not-really-Honorable vigilante.

Right, so it’ll still be possible to bust heads and not suddenly find your character evil aligned.

Yes. Currently, it’s up to you where your h/v slider stands. If you choose to eat puppies, it may be moved for you, but you can move it back. You can explain why. (I was controlled by the moon-aliens! It was my evil twin from Dimension X!)

The last developer diary talks about rapid prototyping and blueprints in the Unreal Engine. Could you expand on those concepts?

Now, Blueprints may not be suitable for various issues – for example, currently, there’s no real way to translate them to C++, so mantaining an analysis of what changed in source is a bit of a bear, so deep or complicated systems do need to be programmed for a game you want to perform long standing maintenance on… But they are fully capable of being everything you need to develop in. They’re sort of… programming turned into Minecraft.

At any rate, thanks to the power of Unreal, we can test five different approaches to a task in the time it would take to test one in a more traditional system. I should note, by the way, that we are going to have a more realistic interior to various missions.

Are you looking at bringing over any mechanics from City of Heroes? Like the day job system.

My metaphor has always been ‘We’re making the game CoH would have been if they knew then what we know now after ten years of face to face lessons.’ Day Jobs are interesting. We’re not doing this at launch, but I’ve actually developed something that’s a bit of an evolution of a concept Jack Emmert failed to bring to fruition. The ORIGINAL Day Jobs plan.

Do tell.

Can’t, really, but… Let’s just say it’s something for you to do when you’re not playing the game. Back in the day they didn’t have apps.

Is it encouraging to see the comic book MMO sort of rise from the ashes? Right now we have three games looking to fill the void left in CoH’s absence.

It is FANTASTIC. Valiance is going to launch before we’re done, we know. But we’re going to offer a richer experience. Honestly, we’re trying to figure out a way to integrate with them. And I don’t mean merge – I mean crossover events and the like.

Right now, if I remember right, we’re starting off where our characters are fictional in their universe and vice versa. So there might be an Anthem movie on a marque.

As much as people are going to hate me for saying it, I like to think City of Heroes shutting down had a lot of positive effects on the genre, as in other companies are starting to participate in it.

Mmmmm… Ask me again after we launch. There’s still a chance we might fail. I’m not getting comfy. I’d like to think that it will wind up being like Enhancement Diversification. Annoying, painful, but it eventually led to the insane glory of IOs.

I’ll finish by asking what your thoughts are on Lockboxes and other cash shop items that seem so popular with gamers these days.

That’s a very, very serious question. The pages you’d get from many of my developers on how they’re bad for gaming and bad for players and bad for ongoing development… on how they hijack the gambling urge…

I do intend for there to be things like lockboxes. But when I say ‘like lockboxes’, I mean things like ‘a parody lockbox that actually has no game effect’ or ‘something more like a magic booster full of fun consumables that have no non-cosmetic effect’ or a few other nonsettled variants on a theme. It is fun to play a chip on the wheel of fortune and see what you get.

But I feel that giving people a present and then forcing them to pay to open it is a cruel, cruel thing. Especially if they take up inventory space. I swear to you, if I have to implement them to keep the game going, they’ll at least be stackable.

I’m not saying I won’t ever do them. I’m saying I really don’t want to do them, and the general concept is one of my ‘innovate and improve’ targets, where I want to make something that is actually fun and rewarding, rather than penalizing and expensive.

What is the timeline for release?

In bits and pieces as it’s done. Not 2015, but we might have parts out earlier than 2016.

Well thank you again for coming out and talking to us.

We’re always glad to talk.

City of Heroes: The Mask Comes Off


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At this point in time, the idea that there are talks underway to get City of Heroes back up and running isn’t a secret. The previously unnamed team has been negotiating with NCSoft to acquire City of Heroes with the request that the negotiations themselves be kept secret and with the knowledge that the whole deal could fall apart at any moment, or could never have had a chance of succeeding in the first place. Today, Nathan Downes of Missing Worlds Media (who we spoke to in our most recent interview) posted an update on the negotiations.

You can read the entire post at the link below, but Downes summarizes the proposal as it stands currently.

The proposal as it stands right now (this is not a final form, just the current proposal on the table) is this:

  • The CoH IP would be spun to its own company, to handle licensing. This company would itself license the existing engine from NCSoft for the creation of a maintenance mode, using a binary copy of the i23 server.
  • The existing user database and characters are not part of this arrangement at this time, nor is the source code.
  • An arrangement is to be made to license the trademarks to the various Plan Z projects, CoT, Valiance and H&V, to create a family connection, and to allow each to drop the “Spiritual” portion of successor. This means they can make references to the original game if desired, and to enable the expansion of partnerships. This could be expanded for any of them, should the desire be there.
  • An arrangement is also to be made for the Atlas Park Revival project. As part of the informal agreement we have with them, they would be given an official stamp of approval, and the CoT game build would be licensed to them, to create a kind of “CoH 1.5” and migrate people off of the classic game engine before it finally becomes unsuitable (we expect this to happen around when Windows 9 is released, due to binary compatibility). This can be done because both APR and CoT run on Unreal Engine 4.
  • By being its own firm, the licensing company can also pursue other avenues which were unavailable before.

(Source: Titan Forums)

Missing Worlds Media Talks: City of Titans


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The story behind Missing Worlds Media and City of Titans is one of true inspiration and dedication. When NCSoft announced that City of Heroes would sunset along with Paragon Studios, members of the community rose up to answer the call to action. By the time City of Heroes shut down for its final maintenance, plans were already underway on several spiritual sequels to fill in the empty void of super hero MMOs. The subject of today’s discussion is City of Titans, code-named The Phoenix Project, under development by Missing Worlds Media.

Last year, Missing Worlds Media put their project to the test, via a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to purchase software and license engines. The team is made up of volunteers who initially met up to try and save City of Heroes, and then turned their focus on creating a new home. The Kickstarter was a massive success, bringing in $680,000 compared to the $320,000 goal.

I managed to sit down with a few members of the Missing Worlds Media team: War Cabbit, Nate ‘Dr. Tyche’ Downes (Tech Lead), Timothy Ross (Writing Lead), and William Strickland. Not all of those are real names. Thank you to everyone from Missing Worlds Media for taking the time to come talk to us.

Connor: So how big is Missing Worlds Media right now?
Nate Downes: We have 83 active members, with 144 people total volunteered.
War Cabbit: Eighty five as soon as two people respond.
Timothy Ross: The number is not set, of course.  We have slowed recruiting down, but not ended it.
War Cabbit: We are, I confess, always looking for experienced 3D people who are willing to assist with the project.

Co: How do you collaborate without an office?
TR: We use a number of different remote services to work together.
WC: We have a chat server, which really keeps us tightly connected, we have a document server, a code repository, a graphics repository, and a game server.
TR: You can imagine the amount of money we save by not having to pay rent on a physical building, not to mention working out transportation and then STILL having to have remote systems for our people in, for instance, Bulgaria.

Co: Do you have any people on City of Titans that worked on other games?
TR: Many.
WC: Oh, certainly. From paper and pencil to computer.
WS: A few. You can tell by the way they jump when you drop something.

Co: Do you have any contact with the ex-developers from Paragon Studios?
ND: Informal. I had a biweekly D&D game with Castle, for example, and I’ve talked to Statesman at PAX Dev last year.
WC: Not technically – they’re forbidden. We have well wishes, the occasional shout-out and a number backed us. That is, they can’t give us help with the project but if we didn’t have their blessing, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Co: How is the reaction to the new Unreal licensing deals? I’ve seen very mixed reactions especially among independent developers.
WC: Well, we’re not using it. Which is a darn good thing – it’d be ruinous to a group our size, per-person. Our licence got set up three months before they announced that.
ND: Their licensing for new clients is a boon for independent small-team developers.
Co: So the monthly fee is per person on the project?
WC: Something like, if I recall. Nate?
NC: At least per-person working with the engine directly. As our goal is to have everyone working with the engine on one level or another, this could get very pricey for us.
WC: You get six-eight programmers, it can add up. It’s great for single-person tinkering, though.

Co: Has the Unreal 4 engine been smooth to work with so far?
WC: It’s beautiful.
TR: It has exceeded all of my personal expectations so far.
WC: It’s like getting your hands on a Rolls Royce. Damn thing is machined.
WS: It’s also friendly, and the Epic staff have also been friendly. It’s almost like they want people to actually buy and use their engine, or something.

Co:  Unreal 4 has better systems for types of damage, if I’ve been reading correctly.
TR: Not just damage, but it really pushes the envelope for what a game can deliver.
WC: It does. It is a ten or fifteen year platform – which is perfect for us. I’m dead serious about treating City of Titans and Missing Worlds Media as something like Marvel Comics – we are here for the long term. We can keep pushing it for the MMO’s lifetime. We may have to do CoT 2.0 and 3.0 sometime, but we’ll handle it.

Co: To what extent is City of Titans going to be procedurally generated?
WC: We intend to lay out the roads by hand, but have the ‘road’ itself, the grade, the turns, be procedural in nature – same for the train tracks and power lines. We’re going to design the character of our neighborhoods, and then procedurally generate the blocks. There will be individual landmarks that we want exactly so and will build ourselves. Eighty percent of any average location will be a procedural block. If we can get it working finely enough to make procedural mission maps that always make sense, I’ll be even happier.
TR: And if we run into problems, we may be able to fix the rough spots the old fashioned way.

Co: You’ve ended preproduction, correct? What does that mean?
ND: No, we’re ending it. Last few bits need to be finished up.
WC: When it ends, we are essentially ‘building the game’ and no longer ‘designing the game’.
TR: Among other things, it means we are now building the systems that will make actually building the world not only much easier, but probably actually fun.

Co: Going on to content for a minute. How are the roles set up? There are five primaries and multiple secondaries for each?
WC: We have a number of primaries and a number of secondary options. By mixing and matching them, we create classes. At the moment, at launch, we are going to have five classes, created by the intersect of primary and secondary.
TR: Where it gets fun is the modular mixing and matching with secondaries, which results in what we call Classifications.
WC: To simplify: Scrapper would be Melee/Defense, Tank would be Defense/Melee. If you choose the right Masteries, of course.
TR: Melee is the Role.  Melee/Defense is the Classification (but it will have a better name).  That Classification would have 5 power sets at launch.

Co: The community is very dedicated and supportive, I’ve noticed.
TR: We love our community.
WS: We ARE our community.
WC: That’s the best thing we brought over from CoH. A very strong culture of helping each other.
TR: And we fully welcome all of the great folk out there who never had a chance to play CoH, and even those who never wanted to. Besides the fact that this is a great time for superheroes in a lot of different media.  Who hasn’t watched The Avengers and thought, “I want to DO that!”  Including people who have never played an MMO.

Co: When are you looking at a release?
ND: Release, likely in 2016. But accessible beta, late 2015.
WC: And costume creator before that.

Co: And one more question before I guess we can call it a wrap. Is there, or will there, be a way for people to pledge who missed out on the Kickstarter?
ND: We have been discussing a second-chance opportunity for those people, yes. We want to finish getting the people who did pledge with Kickstarter processed first.

Co: Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions.
ND: Anytime.
WC: Been a pleasure.
TR: Talk to us anytime.
WS: Thanks for having us, Connor.

Check out City of Titans at the official website.

Videos: City of Titans Trailer


Today’s video comes to us from City of Titans, showing off a few set pieces and concept models.

City of Titans Sets Sights Past Pre-Production


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Missing Worlds Media took to the news to announce that their flagship title, City of Titans, is nearing the end of pre-production. The short letter talks about crafting respawn systems, battling the new Unreal engine, as well as importing Learner’s Cove, the game’s planned tutorial area.

Named after noted pirate Captain James Edward Learner, Learner’s Cove sheltered him after his growing body count had his commission as a privateer stripped and all friendly ports, including the bustling new shipping hub of Clarkestown closed to him. There persist rumors of buried treasure hidden away in the network of caves on the island, but most chalk those up to tall tales and ghost stories.

Check out the entire announcement at the link below.

(Source: Missing Worlds Media)

City of Titans Shows Off New Tech Demo


Our friends over at Missing Worlds Media have unveiled a new video showing off map construction using the new Unreal Engine. It is quite impressive how dramatically a scene can be altered by changing the lighting and leaving models untouched. For more details on the upcoming superhero MMO, check out the City of Titans official website at the link below.

(Source: City of Titans)

City of Titans Moves to Unreal 4 Engine


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Missing Worlds Media has announced via Kickstarter update that City of Titans is in the process of being transitioned to the Unreal 4 engine. What does this mean? Well development has been put back a little bit, but according to the announcement it will be worth it for an even better game.

The new engine will give us advanced rendering features, physics and visual effects. Physically-based shading will give us more control over the look and feel of characters and objects in your new world. We’ll be able to create wide ranges of surfaces, layer materials, and fine-tune values to make Titan City look more incredible and realistic than we originally planned. An added bonus is our NPCs will be smarter and look better than ever!

Unreal 4 was released at this year’s Game Developer Conference where Epic founder Tim Sweeney revealed that developers could get their hands on the source code for a simple $20 monthly subscription plus 5% of revenue on commercial games.

(Source: Kickstarter)

City of Titans in Full Preproduction


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City of Titans is one of the spiritual successors to City of Heroes currently in development. In a recent announcement, Missing Worlds Media revealed the new board elected to oversee operations and ensure that the project makes its way to completion on schedule.

To serve on Missing Worlds Media’s board, we have chosen five highly qualified and capable people: Sara “Firefairy” Quinn, Chris “Warcabbit” Hare, Cameron “Segev” Johnson, David “Terwyn” James and Jennifer “Petalstorm” Bolack. The board is the executive management of the company itself, overseeing all operations and making sure all is going according to plan.

Nate “Doctor Tyche” Downs will be taking the helm as President of Missing Worlds Media with Tim Ross as Vice President. City of Titans is in full pre-production which, as Doctor Tyche puts it, is not the most exciting time and doesn’t have much to show. The aim of focusing on pre-production is to avoid the pitfalls of development hell that seem to trap so many games, as well as to involve the fans in the creation process.

By focusing on pre-production, we can test and evaluate early on, when changes are easier to manage. We can also involve you, the fan, in the pre-production process. When we post ideas here, we listen to the feedback. Sometimes our ideas strike where we believe they will. Sometimes, they just don’t ring the way we had hoped. We listen to both, so we can refine and improve.

You can check out the City of Titans updates at their Kickstarter page linked below.

(Source: Kickstarter)

Taco Tuesday: Now The Gloves Come Off


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In this week’s Taco Tuesday, I want to talk about Missing Worlds Media and City of Titans. With the Kickstarter now over and the money getting set to roll in, it must be understood that playtime is (mostly) over. No longer can Missing Worlds Media be treated as the ragtag group of volunteers with a dream for a better tomorrow that may never be realized. They have accepted money and that means, for better or for worse, City of Titans is going to happen. This means setting budgets, deadlines, and someone to enforce both. It means you now have real customers and obligations to meet, and people that you need to answer to.

As far as expectations go, Missing Worlds Media is now on the level of other independent game studios. This means that the excuse of “we’re just a group of volunteers” doesn’t cut it anymore. That works for games like Black Mesa, where the development team was literally an unfunded group of volunteers. City of Titans, on the other hand, has money going into it by people who are going to expect the product that they paid for. The Kickstarter should be the point where the team at Missing Worlds Media recognizes that City of Titans is now a serious project that they have committed to. This isn’t to say that the fun has to go away, but the stakes are higher and the game has officially begun.

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At the risk of being branded a cynic, devil’s advocate, hater, etc, let me just say that I still have high hopes for City of Titans and will continue supporting it here at MMO Fallout, but with the understanding that this is when Missing Worlds Media needs to buckle down and make this game their priority rather than just a project to be worked on by a group of volunteers. This means managing the team, schedule, and the funds that drive it all.

How do you feel about City of Titans? Drop a comment in the box below with your thoughts.